He began to edge his way carefully towards its stern of the freighter until he was able to pick out the name on the prow of the other ship. It was the Taliba.
Marsh stopped. He knew the boat and he knew who owned it, but there was no way in a million years that he would ever have suspected the man to be involved in something as dangerous as this. And that little knot of truth began to grow in him that his partner, Greg Walsh might have had foreknowledge of what these two ships would be doing here at this precise time and position. And it was that knowledge that meant he had not been killed in a tragic accident at sea.
He had been murdered!
Chapter 2
About a week before the Ocean Quest had been sunk by the freighter, Remo Francesini of the American security service, the C.I.A., had stood in the waiting room of the military hospital at Cape Canaveral in Florida. He was waiting for a doctor to take him along to an isolation ward where a young man lay sick and dying. He was deep in thought and was concerned, not for the young man but for something else that weighed much heavier on his mind.
Francesini was a big man, over six feet tall and weighed about two hundred pounds. He had always prided himself on his fitness, much of which was a result of serving in the United States Marine Corps and subsequently as a member of the Navy Seals; the covert group of specialists who usually worked behind enemy lines on operations that required courage, stealth and a philosophical attitude to whatever fate had in store for them and to whatever their masters ordered them to do. He eventually left the military to join the NYPD.
Today he was at the hospital in his capacity as head of the Mission Support Office, which was responsible for collecting and collating intelligence information and reporting directly to the Deputy Director of Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency, the C.I.A. at Langley in West Virginia. Francesini’s boss was Admiral James Starling and it was the admiral who had insisted that he, Remo Francesini should visit the dying man at the hospital and not one of Remo’s subordinates, which would normally have been the case.
He was the only person in the waiting room. He was wearing green coveralls, a surgeon’s cap on his head and covers over his shoes. He would normally have been smoking one of his beloved Havana cigars, but smoking was banned in all American hospitals, so he contented himself with thinking about the reasons why he was there and where he would sooner be.
It was quiet and the walls, which were almost bare, save for a couple of naval prints, seemed to reflect a melancholy that fused with his own. There was a small table in the room and a couple of chairs. There was no reading material.
Since the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the twin towers, in September, 2001 by the Muslim terrorist organisation Al Qaeda, the whole of the C.I.A. and the White House had become jumpy at the slightest hint of another terrorist operation on American soil. The bosses at the top of the pile were more nervous than their underlings because it would be their heads and jobs on the line if their departments screwed up.
And Admiral Starling was no different, except that he had the C.I.A. Director of Operations bearing down on him who in turn had to contend with the Oval Office in the White House.
The melancholy feeling that settled in Francesini’s mind was the result of a feeling of hopelessness and a fear that he could not prevent another terror attack by Al Qaeda because their attacks were so difficult to predict or detect, despite the most sophisticated technology available and the magnificent and selfless efforts of the C.I.A. agents in the field.
Home grown terrorism was another factor that troubled him and the unbelievable willingness of second and third generation Arab Americans to support their Middle Eastern cousins in their appalling acts of murder.
A sixth sense told him that what he was about to see and hopefully hear, was a warning that had dropped into their laps by sheer good fortune. But even then, Francesini hadn’t a clue just how significant the warning would prove to be; his task was to glean as much from this as was humanly possible and pray that another atrocity would be avoided.
Sadly, the melancholy in him hid his usual countenance of good humour and confidence. He had a charisma that people usually warmed to, which meant never suspecting for a minute that his worries were ably hidden and could quite easily have been their worries.
A door opened and a naval officer stepped into the room. He was dressed in a similar fashion to Francesini.
“You can see him now, sir.”
Francesini walked towards the open door. “Any improvement?” he asked the young naval officer without any real hope.
The young man shook his head. “He’ll be lucky to last another month. Try not to tax him too much.”
“Has he said anything?”
Again the shake of the head. “No, nothing of significance, but you can still try; you may get something out of him.”
Francesini nodded and followed the officer out of the room. The tap of their heels echoed round the walls of the long corridor, intruding into the silence. At the far end of the corridor, the naval officer pushed opened a pair of swing doors that opened into another passage. He stopped by the first door and beckoned Francesini, opening the door for him.
The room looked clinical and efficient. Beside the bed was an array of monitoring equipment humming quietly, interrupted rhythmically by a pulsing sound from a heart monitor. The green trace on the monitor screen looked irregular and the spikes were erratic.
He paused at the bedside and looked down at the man lying on the bed. There were two bottles hanging from a stainless steel contraption with tubes branching down to the patient’s arms. He was in his thirties. Francesini knew that from the man’s notes he had read when he had arrived at the hospital. There was an oxygen bottle beside the man’s bed, but at the moment it was not in use.
Most of his hair had fallen out and what was left hung in small, wispy clumps from his scalp. One eye was closed. The other eye was open but red and angry and weeping. He had suppurating sores on his face and neck and they continued unseen down his body to the soles of his feet.
Francesini knew the man was suffering from bone calcium deficiency, leukaemia and dysentery. He felt desperately sorry for him, not because he was dying, but because of the long and painful end to the poor man’s life.
He was dying from radiation sickness.
Francesini pulled a chair over and sat beside the bed. He studied the man for a while and wondered if he would learn anything because the poor wretch looked comatose. The dying man had been picked up somewhere along the Florida Keys, wandering aimlessly along the road. The police had been called by some concerned citizen who described the man as looking like he had been in a road accident. It was true and he had been in a sorry state even then when the police picked him up. He had no identity papers on him and did not look like an American, although that in itself was not significant. So the local authorities had put him into hospital until the immigration department could deal with him.
The poor man had lain there for several days before a retired army doctor chanced by. What the doctor saw reminded him of clinical notes he had studied in his early days as a junior army doctor. The notes were comprehensive and were of Japan after the atomic bomb. And what the sharp old medic suggested to the Pentagon sent shivers down their spines and set the alarm bells ringing all the way to the White House. The sick man was immediately transferred to the isolation wing where he was now.